National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center
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The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, or NERSC for short, is a designated user facility operated by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Department of Energy. It contains several cluster supercomputers, the largest of which is Franklin, which is ranked 9th on the TOP500 list of world's fastest supercomputers as of November 2007. It is located in Oakland, California.
[edit] History
NERSC was founded in 1974 at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, then called the Controlled Thermonuclear Research Computer Center or CTRCC and consisting of a Control Data Corporation 6600 computer. Over time, it expanded to contain a CDC 7600, then a Cray-1 (SN-6) which was called the "c" machine, and in 1985 the world's first Cray-2 (SN-1) which was the "b" machine, nicknamed bubbles because of the bubbles visible in the fluid of its unique direct liquid cooling system. In the early eighties, CTRCC's name was changed to the National Magnetic Fusion Energy Computer Center or NMFECC. The name was again changed in the early nineties to National Energy Research Supercomputer Center. In 1996 NERSC moved from LLNL to LBNL. In 2000, it was moved to its current location in Oakland.
[edit] Computers and projects
NERSC's fastest computer, Franklin, is named after Benjamin Franklin for his role as a scientist. It is a Cray XT4 with 19,320 Opteron processor cores and runs the Suse Linux operating system on its service nodes, and the lightweight Compute Node Linux (CNL) on each node.
Other clusters at NERSC are named Bassi, Jacquard, DaVinci, and PDSF, the longest continually operating Linux cluster in the world. The facility also contains a 8.8 petabyte HPSS, or high performance storage system.
NERSC facilities are accessible through the Energy Sciences Network or ESnet, which was created and is controlled by NERSC.
